How can sustainable entrepreneurial enterprises escape the "green prison" in the context of environmental dynamism? — An Ecological Niche Enhancement Perspective

The "green prison" refers to the prisoner's dilemma that entrepreneurs face in regard to sustainability, and entrepreneurs tend to escape from the green prison through a series of proactive legitimizing behaviors such as "changing or establishing institutions that create incentives to play the competitive game—norms, property rights, and legislation". However, how sustainable entrepreneurial enterprises (SEEs) escape from the "green prison" under environmental dynamism and the dynamic changes in the legitimacy acquisition process has not yet received adequate attention. This paper introduces ecological niche theory into legitimacy research, interprets the growth of SEE as the process of individual ecological niches realizing ecostate‒ecorole enhancement within population ecological niches, constructs a set of legitimacy scales and an ecostate‒ecorole index system for SEE, and empirically analyzes a sample of 307 SEEs in China. The results show that (1) cognitive legitimacy, normative legitimacy, and regulatory legitimacy play the ecostate‒ecorole enhancement roles for SEEs at low, medium, and high ecological niche levels, respectively; (2) the dynamic change patterns of legitimacy are consistent across the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of the ecological niche of a SEE; (3)environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between cognitive legitimacy and the ecological niche situation at a low ecological niche level, as well as between normative legitimacy and the enhancement of the ecological niche situation at a medium ecological niche level, however, it does not moderate the relationship between regulatory legitimacy and the enhancement of the ecological niche situation at a high ecological niche level. This study identifies the paths through which legitimacy changes dynamically along different dimensions and levels of the ecological niche of a SEE, which provides new guidelines on how SEEs can acquire legitimacy under environmental dynamism and expands and enriches the research field of ecological niche theory.